The Unmaking of a President

The Unmaking of a President
Governing in prose is one thing. Preferring weasel words to governing at all is another
by Matthew Norman
August 3, 2011

I hate to come over all crudely simplistic about an event of byzantine complexity, because the cards Obama held were, like so many of the hands dealt him since taking office, close to unplayable. As Sarah Churchwell brilliantly wrote on these pages yesterday, there is no negotiating with as delusional, anti-democratic and rank ignorant an entity as the Tea Party. These people are the modern version of Samson, literature's first suicide bomber, and would bring the temple down on themselves to kill the enemy, be that the concept of taxation itself or a black leader, or both.

Obama survived by placating them. He may even, though it is far too soon to tell, have narrowed the odds on his re-election. If he has simultaneously repositioned himself as a centrist and highlighted Republican extremism, as Bill Clinton did to propel himself to a 1996 landslide after Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government, it may yet be seen as a masterstroke.

This column comes in sorrow rather than anger. He is, as I said, a good man, and who believed that one of those could win the White House? But no more than noble intent and high intellect is goodness enough. As the age of American hegemony implodes, war is being waged in the US between progressive and reactionary forces. In allowing the latter such an unmitigated triumph, he first retreated, then first went missing in action, and finally resurfaced to claim victory. All politicians do that, you might say, and therein lies the peculiarly tragic nature of this presidency. What was Obama, after all, if not the alternative to all politicians?

He could have drawn a line in the sand. He, who claimed he'd rather be a transformational one-term president than a two-term duffer, could have said, "You didn't elect me to preside over a brutal diminution of the rights of the needy, and I won't have it" and risked himself in the fight to spread the pain between poor and wealthy. He might have lost and become unelectable – even been forced to stand aside in 2012 for Hillary Clinton.

Read the full article at:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-norman/matthew-norman-the-unmaking-of-a-president-2330667.html